Big City Life isn’t so much an album as it is a masterful sequence of gestures: flickers of sound, half-decisions, the musical equivalent of shrugging while making eye contact. The Norwegian duo – Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt – still sound like they’re texting each other ideas at odd hours, deliberately left open-ended to preserve their magic.
Smerz are still working in the zone where club music, art-school minimalism, and emotional confession overlap. Big City Life operates on a kind of low-battery logic: everything flickers, fades, or folds back on itself with hypnotic intention. These are ideas introduced and strategically abandoned. Beats arrive late and leave early by design. Melodies make brief, tantalising appearances. It’s the feeling of living inside half-finished conversations, multiple tabs open, a hundred things happening at once and nothing really landing.
Smerz have always been drawn to the uncanny edges of youth: the weird little emotional spills that don’t quite make it into the narrative. Their 2018 Have Fun EP had the vibe nailed: Bama rush meets Blair Witch, all TikTok gloss smeared with lo-fi dread. Big City Life expands on that impulse – a collection of hazy, emotionally precise fragments – moments from four years of living, half-remembered and reorganised into music.
‘Feisty’ might be the rowdiest thing here, with synths that could’ve been lifted from a ’90s George Michael track, an impressionistic rendering of club music heard from an adjacent room. Stoltenberg’s dry narration scrolls through flashes of a night out – the bathroom-mirror check, the futile DJ request – as if skipping back through your camera roll while hungover. The string stabs are knowingly cheap; the drums have that dusty ESG texture. There’s introspection, maybe even regret – but earlier, there’s also this: “Hey girl, I really wanna be your friend / Let us talk and dance until the end.
Synths are smudged and skeletal. One-finger piano lines appear and vanish. Percussion skitters by instinct more than rhythm. The songs are built like feelings – layered, ambiguous, possibly imagined. You get fragments of narrative: loneliness, mania, self-talk, affection.
What Smerz is doing here feels like a protosingularity – that weird threshold where tech starts crawling under your skin. Those tribal drum patterns keep breaking through the digital surface like memories you didn’t know you had. It’s happening all over music now: artists grappling with our tech entanglement before the final merger happens. Smerz knows better than to explain – just surrender and dance through it. It’s like Wet Leg got reimagined by William Gibson after a late-night, dreamy R&B slowed to a cyberpunk crawl.
The album captures a specific kind of contemporary attention span: fractured, fleeting, slightly numb. It’s sparse, suggestive, and pointedly uninterested in conventional structure. Call it anti-pop, call it sketchwork, Big City Life feels like an album made by people who’ve seen how the machine works and decided to send it a series of vague voice notes instead.
